High-Level Strategies

"Enjoy the experience. Play thoughtfully, make good decisions.  Don't evaluate past decisions while you're still playing. Be realistic. Focus on what you can control."

-A. Brokos

"In reality, winning a bracelet is really, really hard. All you can hope for is to play your best, stay focused, and not look back with regret that you didn't play as well as you could have."

-X. Liu

"To win in poker you need heart, when the chips are down, you don't quit. The cards will come and things will work out, and as long as I have faith in that, and make sure that every decision I make in every hand is the right one or the best informed one, then I'm not worried about what happens." 

-D. Negreanu

"Put the blinders on. Never before have patience and discipline been so important, not to mention physical fitness. Keep telling yourself, 'Do the right thing each time.' You don't want to wake up after it's all over – and it will come to an end – and find yourself wishing you'd done something different." 

-J. Beevers.

"Every professional gambler I know is addicted to solving puzzles. The big attraction to [these poker players] is never the money. It's always the game... It's the puzzle.... solve the puzzle on each hand. If you lose, you lose. Learn from it and don't look back with regret. Look back instead and figure out what you did wrong, so that you don't do it again."

A. Snyder

"The most overrated achievement is making it out of the first day. Such an achievement is a measure of … well, nothing. So don't worry about making day two or going broke. Just play your best game and try to get chips." 

-R. Rosenblum

"Just play your normal game. There are no adjustments you need to make for a large field. You can only win chips from, or lose chips to, the players at your table. So focus on them, and how to do your best against them. Whether the tournament is 100 players or 10,000, you will need to outlast about 90% to make the money. And that requires the same amount of skill and run-good for either event. Don't expect to win, or even to make it past Day One. Just play your best game, and enjoy yourself while you're doing it. As long as you're playing your best, then it's like any other tournament – anything, good and bad, can happen to anybody." 

-Greg Raymer

"Holy Shit. I'm going to the WSOP!" 

-Bug

On to the next installment in the WSOP journey....

Golden Guru Game Guidance

The Guru flew into town from the Philippines for a short visit this week (and boy are his arms tired). I had the opportunity to catch up with him this afternoon for an hour or so at a local coffee shop before he jets back out. As is usual when the two of us get together, we covered a lot of ground, from politics to corporate greed to welfare to friends and families. Included among all the topics was, of course, some poker talk. Specifically, the Guru gave me some advice for the upcoming WSOP:

1. Look Left. Serendipitously, Andrew Brokos did a piece on this very topic recently (here). The Guru's own reasoning is that the action upstream of you is finished by the time it gets to you. I.e., you can slow down and replay it in your head once the action gets to you. The players to your left, however, haven't yet acted, so focus on their body language and any other tells you can pick up. Figure out what they're going to do. Stealing from those to your left can significantly chip your stack up, so focus on them.
2. Fry the Fish. The idea with this one is to really focus on identifying the fish at the table, and then work on attacking them. "It doesn't matter where they sit," the Guru said, "steal from them." This advice compliments some podcast material I've been listening to lately, in which the general advice is to a) spot the fish; b) identify what kind of mistakes they're making; and c) exploit those mistakes over and over again until they change their habits. 
3. Stay Ahead of the Blinds. Tight is right, but do not over do it. You need to stay ahead of the escalating blinds at all times. Be aware of when the blinds are going up and what your own M is and will be. Again, this echoes something I've read again in writings by Matt Matros, who has repeatedly said that the secret to winning a big tournament is simple: "accumulate chips." Sounds so simple, eh? Seriously, this also lines up with Snyder's advice on getting your chips into play and building a big stack so that you can have full chip utility. There is no greater MTT sin than getting blinded away.

Onto the next installment on this WSOP journey....

All-in for now...

-Bug